China, November 2013 – Travel Notes

After our visit with the bears at the Old Breeding Center, we moved down the hill to the Panda Kindergarten.  Who doesn’t love watching the panda cubs?  During our visit there were only two cubs in the Kindergarten with the other four 2012 cubs having just moved to Dujiangyan (I promise, we’ll feature those little ones too).   Zheng Zheng and Yi Ran put on quite the show for us.

Zheng Zheng is the slightly larger of the two and is quite the acrobat (see video below).  He was the first CCRCGP cub to be born in 2012, on July 11, 2012.  He is the elder twin of Xi Mei and Lu Lu and the great-grandson of Pan Pan.

Yi Ran is the smaller of the two, but don’t let that size fool you!  When we were watching, Yi Ran finished her milk in record time and went after Zheng Zheng’s – pushing him out of the way to get to it!  Yi Ran, affectionately called “Dot” thanks to the tell-tale black dot on her forehead, is the elder twin of Shui Xiu.  Born on July 24, 2012, she has the distinction of having parents that are both wild born.  Yi Ran’s mother was rescued from Beichuan on 22 March 2008.  She was injured in the wild and lost her front left paw.  Her father is Yi Bao, who was rescued as a baby in December 2006 from Baoxing.

While he wasn’t in the kindergarten while we were visiting in November, we just learned that Jia Jia has moved back to the kindergarten with Zheng Zheng and Yi Ran.   We wrote about Jia Jia, Hua Mei’s 9th cub, in our Green Lake post.